GRACE, INTERVIEWED (1995): North Shore to Black Sand Shore

Graham Reid | Apr 6, 2014 | 8 min read

Grace: Distant Blue

The rooms backstage at the Auckland
Town Hall aren’t up to much. Clean, certainly, but this very small
one comes with only a tiny mirror above the handbasin, the toilet is
somewhere down the hall, and the six people waiting here are rotating
in the five available seats.

This is an important night for the
room’s temporary occupants. Grace – the three Ioasa brothers –
short time Chills drummer Earl Robertson and backing vocalist Bic
Runga.

In a few minutes they open for Ruby
Turner and last night in Hamilton their set erred on the rocky side
and misjudged her mainstream audience. They’ve changed it
completely tonight. Keyboardist Anthony expresses relief at being
back home playing to Aucklanders - but mostly they worry about the
soundcheck they’ll be getting.

Opening acts rarely get a decent
soundcheck and this night has been no exception . . . and the time
before these support slots they were let down again. That was an
important gig too.

Grace are a band that a lot of people
have, quite rightly it would seem, big hopes pinned on. Kane Massey
of the Deepgrooves label signed them up for a three album deal before
they’d even recorded a single and Sony Music Publishing has done a
sub-publishing deal with Deepgrooves for New Zealand, Australia and
territories overseas including Japan, England and Europe.

Sony’s Paul Ellis says they are
delighted to be associated with Deepgrooves, and Festival Records
(which distributes Deepgrooves) confidently claim Grace as “New
Zealand’s premier urban soul act” who “have the potential to be
the next big international act to emanate from this country.”

The Ioasa brothers, while cautious,
have a degree of self-confidence, experience and aspiration which
supports others’ expectations. However, they come without much of a
track record aside from that attractive debut single Skin To Skin
(which they say is unrepresentative) and the Confessions follow-up.

So when Grace launched their Black Sand
Shore album at the Galaxy in mid-February, there was a turnout of
media and industry people, hors d’oeuvres and drinks - and a
general feeling among the assembly of wanting Grace to do well.

Black Sand Shore bristles with musical
ideas but weaves them adeptly into a kind of ambient soul, and their
first video (Confessions, artfully directed by Jonathan King) was
number one on MaxTV’s Pepsi Chart Attack. So was their second, the
self-directed Black Sand Shore.

“One of the finest local pop bands
around and their debut album is stunning,” says MaxTV’s Daniel
Wrightson. Brent Cardy in Real Groove wrote of “the exemplary
production on this diverse, very stylish debut,” and Russell
Baillie hailed their “assured debut” and noted that, at its best,
the album hummed along languorously, synthetically and was
imaginatively textured.

A band on its way but . . .

The Galaxy night had to be counted as a
disappointment. The sound was appalling. Robertson's metronomic style
hammered insensitively through the centre and all nuance and subtlety
were lost. For a band whose music demands the most acute balance of
sound, it was criminal.

And now they are sitting backstage
knowing they just had an inadequate soundcheck and someone else’s
audience is out there to be won over.

Guitarist Paul silently concentrates on
a video game, Anthony tells how he sang once here when he was five
and was told off by the teacher.

The Grace story begins long ago,
although curiously, this is the first time the three brothers have
played together in a band.

“You never want to play with your
family, it’s so embarrassing! We never spent much time together, so
the weird thing is we’re all together now,” says Anthony. “We’ve
all got into different things but now we’re starting to get closer,
more like friends than brothers. We have different characteristics
and tastes as people, so I can’t really speak for the rest of the
band. If I talk about music it’s ‘I don’t like that band, why
did you say I did?’ Very funny.”

It’s a week before the Ruby Turner
tour and he’s sitting in the office at Festival putting the bigger
picture of Grace forward. It’s a cliche-defying story delivered
with humour, visible frustration and one which betrays a deep sense
of musical smarts. It’s a matter of getting the audience past the
preconceptions, he says as he sits wearing a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt
and discussing favourite musicians as diverse as Soundgarden, Brian
Eno, Bailterspace and Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera. That’s not quite
the musical agenda many expect from three New Zealand-born Samoan
brothers. And there lies the problem . . .

“We get it all the time! ‘So, you
got a whole set of Marvin Gaye records at home?” That’s the
educated guess. The other thing is rap. ‘You’re not a rap band
are you?’ Then when the video came along, people asked if we were a
soul band or not. But we just love heaps of music.”

And people assume skin colour
determines musical taste?

He looks depressed. “Yeah, and we get
it from our own people as well - that’s what scared us the most,”
he says wearily.

“We thought we’d get it from
Europeans but you’d think that your own people would support you
first. They expected us to be the next Fuemana and something from
South Auckland. People put that South Auckland stamp on us and it was
written right from the word go. It’s really hard to change that,”
says the former student of Rosmini College, on Auckland’s North
Shore.

“We just tell people we’re a band
and love music and you can’t judge a person on what music they
listen to.”

Fortunately not, because Grace would
confound all expectation. Their story has been canvassed by now:
growing up in a strict family where their immigrant father insisted
on discipline and music lessons, joining the family covers band,
early burnouts... And with an encyclopaedic musical knowledge
acquired along the way.

Jason - a merchant banker by day -
learned bass, joined the family band, had classical training and his
conversation can effortlessly embrace legendary jazz musicians such
as Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke... and David Bowie.

Brother Paul started on piano at the
age of nine, joined the band with Anthony and Jason and had lessons
in flamenco playing.

And Anthony began on drums, shifted to
piano, had classical training ... “We’ve had to sit two grades a
year and that was tough, then performance classes. I was taught jazz,
but it didn't go with classical harmonies and some things we would
want to do I was told not to try. I ran away from home at 17 and
never went back. That’s when Dad really woke up to pushing us too
hard.”

The family band -- playing Elvis,
Everly Brothers and so on: “They’ve all been remade or remixed
today, so they must have something!” -- looms large in their
background. Anthony characterises their upbringing as violent, his
father driving them hard to achieve. They’d play three nights a
week, music lessons on the weekend and “we’d lose friends because
we couldn’t go to the movies or just jam. Friends didn’t
understand we just had to do this. I don’t think I’ve understood
completely until now and I’m 26”.

He says the brothers only recently
decided to reveal the circumstances of their upbringing because other
kids are probably going through the same thing, but they’ve got
their own careers to push, too, and we can, hopefully, be an example
to carry on.”

Anthony did numerous jobs and
eventually went to university: “I started a BCom then jumped to a
BMus but didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t think it would be Fame but
thought it would be a bit more open-minded and testing of theory.”

He lasted a year, “ran into some
people in studios, listened to bands, made music at home with
samples, bought heaps of records, started hanging out in studios and
finding out why people get to number one, why the charts work this
way, then realised [the] music industry was not about music but about
marketing and publicity”.

He’s an established producer (Jules
Issa, Three the Hard Way) and his inventive remix of Greg Fleming’s
Codeine Road took the song from a light country feel into a shuffling
city beat. He’s now working on Fleming’s new album and has just
finished a Paul Kelly remix.

Not surprisingly then, Grace wrote,
arranged and produced their album themselves. And in places it
embraces everything from urban soul to... that sounds like Fripp and
Eno’s guitar ambience on No Pussyfooting, doesn't it?

“We love Eno’s work. He explore
different angles and harmonies. My harmonies come from Debussy, he’s
my God. I always turn back to him, although he’s probably a bit too
sweet for the Nineties. There's more of an open-tuning style of
harmony in the Nineties. We tried to amalgamate Ryuichi Sakamoto as
well, just those harmonies and the way they attack certain textures
in a melody, it might just be a few notes or a sound but it acts as a
melody.”

He deflects praise or criticism of the
album, noting that it is simply a starting point and a picture of
where they are now. They will be in Australia recording a second
[album] in the middle of the year with “a lot more edge, more
guitar.”

“We want to do things that other
bands might not have had the studio time to do or wouldn't even think
of putting on an album, or put on five albums down when they are
confident they've become established. But we’ve also learned
patience, which is what the music business is all about. That’s
helped us sit back and not rush into things.”

Yet things have moved fast enough:
their Skin To Skin single of late '93 took off in Wellington and set
things up for Confessions, which received a NZ On Air video grant and
high-rotation refund. “New Zealand On Air are very supportive; we
wouldn’t be where we are without them. The first single was just a
jam but we needed to start somewhere and prove to people we had an
album in us. You could always wait for the right musos, the right
time and the right feeling, but it won’t happen.

“So it was ‘start now’. And we
got two nominations for the Music Awards [most promising band, most
promising male vocalist] out of it.”

They pulled the support slot for Bryan
Adams and they were on their way: “We felt like we were Queen up
there! Jason did a breakdown and to feel 13,000 hands clap in time
was great! You could feel the stage moving. I can’t get enough of
it - give me another one.”

A week later it came soon enough with
Ruby Turner.

Their set finished, they slump quietly
in the soulless room again; by any measure it was a fine performance.
No, they couldn’t hear each other onstage and their set was
abruptly cut short; yes, the acoustic guitar was all but inaudible
and the audience was cool for the first two numbers... but then it
happened: for Winter Madness, Jason got the whole audience clapping
along. From then on, the audience was theirs. In the very back row,
people were cheering wildly as their distinctive sound faded.

Backstage again, they sit quietly or
express frustration with the sound, Kane Massey and Festival’s Mark
Ashbridge bring beer and wine. The mood lifts, some slip out to see a
little of Ruby and there's talk about the long overnight drive to
Wellington for the next one.

A band on its way.

Grace's album Back Sand Shore is available in iTunes. They never made a second album. Paul Ioasa was killed in a car accident in the USA in 2003

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Your Comments

Dee - Apr 8, 2014

Aww I loved that song - it all seems so long ago, and it's sad to learn that one of the brothers died young. Grace should've been more successful, and you can argue that about a lot of NZ artists from that era. Makes you wonder how they'd fare in today's environment - we are so much more supportive and proud of NZ's own for a start, and it's arguably easier to generate your own buzz with social media (?). Anyway thanks for the memory with this post.

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